Playing around with HDR-Photography

During my visit of Amsterdam, I tried to do some bracketing at places with a big difference between light and dark areas, having in mind to follow the present hype: High Dynamic Range effects, sometimes really nice and sometimes simply exaggerated, but always somewhat interesting. I’m aware of the differences in the opinions of people about it, as willwm says in his blog:

Some people love the effect and others hate it. Some say it’s not ‘pure’ photography others ask what pure photography really is? Some call it ‘fake’ and others see it as a thing of beauty.

Well, to be honest, I don’t really care about what people say about it in general, because it can be so extremely different that you cannot really evaluate it as a hole. What I think is that it can be nice and ugly, depending on how it’s used, and that I seem to use it a bit too intensively because I want to play with the effect. Maybe I’ll learn that in the future 🙂

Because I did not carry a tripod with me, some of the images where not fitting exact enough to make a hdr-image with them, others weren’t different enough in their exposure (still too bright/too dark areas), but some where ok and so I started generating HDRs, then took these and tonemapped them (everything in Qft… Qtfp… – let me look up the name – Qtpfsgui). After some tweaking in gimp, they looked like this:

On top of the Westerkerk

Pipe Organ of the Oude Kerk

Pipe Organ of the Oude Kerk (dark version)

I thought I can show them here, since they are the first more or less successful tests I did (although it has really nothing to do with 3D graphics). Would be interested in what you think about it.